brewer and treyens 1981 Flashcards
aim
my study for schema theory
To check whether peoples memory of objects in an office would be influenced by their schemata of how an Office should look like
participants
Either 86 or 30 university students and they are psychology students from the uni of Illinois
method
laboratory experiment
procedure
Participants were lead into a an office room told to wait for the psychologist. They were told this was the experimenters office. They did not realise the study had already began. After 35-60 seconds the participant was taken to a nearby room and allocated one of 3 conditions:
•RECALL CONDITION: participants were asked to write down as many objects as they could remember from the office. They were then given a booklet containing a list of 131 objects which they had to rate how sure they were that the object was in the room. (70 of them were not in the room)
DRAWING CONDITIONS :
*WRITING participants were given an outline of the room and asked to draw the object they could remember
•VERBAL RECOGNITION CONDITION: participants were read a list of objects and asked whether they though the object was in the room or not.
findings of the study
In the writing and drawing condition participants were more likely to remember items that were in agreement with their schema of an office. For example, in the written recall condition 29 participants remembered there was a desk and chair but only 8 remembered there was a skull.
Reconstruction errors also occurred where 9 participants remembered there were books when there were no books.
So basically people remembered the things which were in agreement with their schema (even if the said things were not really there)
conclusion
They demonstrate that schema does affect the way we take in information, and memory recall (people remember what goes with their schema and what doesn’t)
strengths
-Confirms schema theory and reconstructive memory
-Easy to replicate
weaknesses
-Low ecological validity
-Deception
-Sample bias (??)
